Gurdial Singh Sandhu, Additional Chief Secretary (urban development) of Rajasthan government said master plans for 297 towns, out of which 113 are Census towns, have been prepared.
With this, the state might be the first to have designed master plans for all its cities. Besides this, he said, the state government prepared simple master plans for 100 villages with population of about 10,000, providing directions on how development should happen.
To enable urban local bodies raise money for projects under Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM), Rajasthan government devised funding mechanisms.
The state government gives a grant or soft loan to urban local bodies under the fund, called the Rajasthan development fund, which has a corpus of Rs 1,000 crore.
The fund is mostly for smaller cities whose urban local bodies don’t have much money. Thirty urban local bodies have benefited from it since 2010. The state government has collected Rs 1,000 crore till now, of which it has disbursed Rs 700 crore.
The state government aims to collect upto Rs 2,000 crore so that urban local bodies can safely meet their share of the funding for projects sanctioned under JNNURM.
The state government also has a Rajasthan transport infrastructure development fund to fill a viability gap of Rs 30-40 crore for running 400 buses in Jaipur and 35 in Ajmer.
